2008 lipiec | Technology

Missing Sync for Symbian Offers Proximity Sync

Mark/Space has made a name for themselves by providing tools for synchronizing data between the Mac and a wide variety of mobile devices. Their latest is the $39.95 The Missing Sync for Symbian, the smartphone operating system used extensively by Nokia, and less so by Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and Samsung. Symbian was recently acquired by Nokia (see “Symbian Smartphone Platform Goes Free, Partly Open Source,” 2008-06-24).

The Missing Sync for Symbian, like other versions of The Missing Sync, enables users to synchronize contacts, calendars, and tasks with Apple’s Address Book and iCal, and with Sync Services-savvy applications such as Microsoft Entourage and Market Circle’s Daylite. It can also synchronize music, photos, and videos in both directions, making it possible to upload new photos or videos from the phone into iPhoto, and to download photos from iPhoto into the phone. You can even synchronize documents such that you can view and edit them with compatible handheld applications. The Missing Sync for Symbian also lets you archive text messages and call logs (on only Nokia smartphones) to the Mac for searching or for billing purposes.

But where The Missing Sync for Symbian stands out from other versions of The Missing Sync, and from Apple’s iPhone, is with its new Proximity Sync technology. Instead of connecting your phone to your Mac via USB, Proximity Sync enables the phone to sync data automatically via Bluetooth whenever it comes within roughly 30 feet of your Mac. That’s certifiably clever, and if a phone could add wireless inductive charging, we could be rid of all these stupid cables for power and communication with our mobile devices.

Should the iPhone add proximity syncing? Purely from a technology standpoint, the answer is yes - it’s a cool feature and other phones have been able to sync via Bluetooth for some time. Joe Kissell tells me that he has even used proximity as a trigger with the ProximitySync action suite for the Salling Clicker remote-control software. But Bluetooth doesn’t make nearly as much sense for iPhone syncing as it might for other phones. The quantity of data being synced is the main issue, given that the iPhone backs itself up on every sync and will often be synchronizing hefty podcasts and video files. At best, Bluetooth
2.0+EDR offers 3 Mbps of throughput, which is peanuts compared with USB 2.0’s 480 Mbps, so syncs could take hours instead of minutes. Also, from a practical standpoint, the battery life on the iPhone is sufficiently short that it will need to be plugged in every day, making Apple’s approach of combining recharging and synchronization an easy choice.

Copyright © 2008 Adam C. Engst. TidBITS is copyright © 2008 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you’re reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

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Apple Claims MobileMe Mail Fully Restored

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Apple’s mysterious David G., apparently a member of the MobileMe product team (and possibly a relative of saxophonist Kenny G), tells us in a post last week that the 1 percent of MobileMe users stranded without access to archived mail since 18-Jul-08 - but with the ability to send and receive new mail since 25-Jul-08 - should all be back in action.

Mr. G. says that any remaining email problems should be unrelated to this issue. Apple established a chat line for remaining mail problems, but says it should only be used for these problems. Their regular chat line, which I used last week, has a 30-minute wait time.

I’ve critiqued Apple about the MobileMe launch fiasco a number of times in the last few weeks; how would I have handled it? I’ve been in situations with much smaller numbers of customers or clients where outages have occurred, and worked with firms that have gone through such outages (as a customer or client).

MobileMe’s launch should have been delayed. Steve Jobs clearly told the team it needed to be ready for the 11-Jul-08 launch; it was not. They probably knew this. No one said, “We need to delay MobileMe.”
MobileMe’s launch should have been staged. First, iPhone 3G owners should have had access when signing up for new accounts. Then iPhone 3G and original iPhone owners with existing .Mac accounts or who wanted new accounts should have been given access. Then a slow transition for users who weren’t interested in the sync changes could have happened over weeks.
When the outage affecting 1 percent of users was discovered, Apple should have realized that the problem was likely to take longer than a few hours to resolve, and acknowledged the critical nature of email to people’s businesses and personal lives.
Apple should have immediately posted a page for affected users - and distributed information through Mac news sources - where users could enter a forwarding address to receive email during the outage. They should also have offered to set up clean new accounts on either MobileMe or even a competing service to handle email for the duration of the outage.
Once the outage was over, Apple could have worked with their customers to merge their two separate archives of email messages, let people import old mail archives, or what have you. It wouldn’t have been pretty, but it would have been better than a week without access to new email or outgoing email.

Essentially, Apple waited a week to provide fresh, identically named accounts for those without email, restoring email from that missing week. Over the last week, they merged archived messages into those new accounts. They could have made that decision earlier and been seen as very responsive, saving thousands of people days of frustration.

By refusing to acknowledge the problems in public for as long as they did, Apple has instead annoyed numerous customers (to put it mildly) and come off as arrogant and incompetent.

Copyright © 2008 Glenn Fleishman. TidBITS is copyright © 2008 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you’re reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

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Google Maps Adds Walking Directions

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Though relatively late to the mapping game, Google Maps has become one of the top sites for viewing maps, getting driving directions, and more. Now the Google geeks have added walking directions to Google Maps, eliminating the logic that routes cars the correct way down one-way streets and taking into account pedestrian-only pathways when possible.

Since we were just travelling in England, I asked for walking directions from the Old Mill Hotel (built in about 1500, where we stayed for a night in Salisbury) to the Salisbury Cathedral. When we were there, Google Maps had outlined a 1.4 mile walk that seemed somewhat excessive, and indeed, the nice people at the hotel pointed us to the Town Path, a pleasant little walkway across the water meadows that connects to the rest of the city. Alas, even Google’s new walking directions knew nothing of the Town Path, and suggested a much longer route along city streets. Compare the red actual walking route to Google’s suggested route in the screenshot.

Similarly, when I asked Google Maps for directions from the hotel we stayed at in Portsmouth to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyards where we saw HMS Victory, HMS Warrior, and the Mary Rose, Google stuck to roads, ignoring Portsmouth’s Millennium Promenade, which provides a far more enjoyable stroll along the shore.

Google is aware that there are many pedestrian walkways that they don’t know about, and they’re working on ways of collecting new data about them and soliciting feedback from those with their feet on the ground about the best routes. Of course, I hope that Google acknowledges that the “best” route isn’t always the most efficient; walking along the Millennium Promenade in Portsmouth very well may not have been the fastest way to our destination, but it was well worth an extra 5 or 10 minutes for the ocean views, and to avoid car fumes, intersections, and worrying about whether our 9-year-old was paying sufficient attention to which direction the cars would be
coming whenever we crossed a road.

Copyright © 2008 Adam C. Engst. TidBITS is copyright © 2008 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you’re reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

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